Open Content Alliance
The Open Content Alliance (OCA) is a consortium of non-profit and for-profit groups dedicated to building a free archive of digital text and multimedia. It was announced in October 2005 by Yahoo! and the Internet Archive. The OCA has portrayed itself as a response to what it sees as Google Book Search's closed nature. The OCA aims to keep works in the public domain on-line. These results will then be used in the search results of participating search engines. The OCA uploads books by process of book scanning. OCA's approach to seeking permission from copyright holders differs significantly from that of Google Book Search. OCA intends to digitize copyrighted works only after asking and receiving permission from the copyright holder ("opt-in"). By contrast, Google Book Search plans to digitize copyrighted works unless explicitly told not to do so by November 1, 2005 ("opt-out"), and contends that digitizing for the purposes of indexing is fair use. Also starting in October 2005, the Open Library website (openlibrary.org) is hosted by the Internet Archive as a display window for books that have been scanned by the Alliance. Another announcement in July 2007 revealed a new project under the same name (demo.openlibrary.org), with the ambitious long-time goal of collecting and uniting catalog data for all books in the world, whether scanned by the Alliance or not. This cataloging project is headed by Aaron Swartz. Microsoft had a special relationship with the Open Content Alliance. Microsoft joined the Open Content Alliance at its start in 2005. A year after joining, Microsoft added a restriction that prohibits a book it has digitized from being included in commercial search engines other than Microsoft’s (ie. Google), although other search engines are free to point users to the material, just not full-text searches. In addition unlike Google Books, there are no restrictions on the distribution of the Microsoft scanned copies for academic purposes across institutions."Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web", by Katie Hafner, The New York Times, October 22, 2007 Between about 2006 and 2008 Microsoft scanned over 300,000 books which were contributed to the collection, as well as financial support and scanning equipment. On May 23, 2008 Microsoft announced it would be ending the Live Book Search project and no longer scanning books."Book search winding down", Live Search Blog. Official announcement from Microsoft. Last accessed May 23, 2008. Microsoft made its scanned books available without contractual restriction and made the scanning equipment available to its digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs. Contributors The following organizations have contributed to the OCA: *Adobe Systems Incorporated *Columbia University *Emory University *European Archive *HP Labs *Internet Archive *Johns Hopkins University Libraries *McMaster University *Memorial University of Newfoundland *Missouri Botanical Garden *MSN *National Archives (UK) *O'Reilly Media *Prelinger Library and Prelinger Archives *Research Libraries Group *Rice University *Smithsonian Institution Libraries *University of British Columbia *University of California *University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign *University of Ottawa *University of Pittsburgh *University of Toronto *University of Virginia *Yahoo! *York University Biodiversity Heritage Library, a cooperative project of: *American Museum of Natural History *Harvard University Botany Libraries *Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology *Missouri Botanical Garden *Natural History Museum, London *The New York Botanical Garden *Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew *Smithsonian Institution Libraries See also *Digital library *Google Book Search *List of digital library projects *Project Gutenberg *Universal library Notes External links *Open Content Alliance Home *Open Library website and its cataloging project *Video from Open Content Alliance Launch, Oct 2005 *The Universal Library (Carnegie Mellon site) *Google Library Project *Google Book Search *Internet Archive Home *Digitized Content in the Internet Archive from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library News Articles *Scan This Book! (May 14, 2006 New York Times) *Microsoft To Join Book-Search Alliance (October 26, 2005 International Herald Tribune] *In Challenge to Google, Yahoo Will Scan Books (October 3, 2005 New York Times article) *Building the Universal Library (May 18, 2005 Search Engine Watch) *Google's Moon Shot: The quest for the universal library February 5, 2007 article in The New Yorker Blog Posts *The Universal Library and Other Book Digitization Projects (Search Engine Watch) *Yahoo Search announcing Open Content Alliance Category:Digital libraries Category:Open content Category:Organizations established in 2005 de:Open Content Alliance ja:Open Library fi:Open Content Alliance